Obama Strikes Again

Shock Revelation: Obama Admin Actively Sabotaged Gun Background Check System

BY CILLIAN ZEAL 
MARCH 16, 2018 AT 6:49AM

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Testimony by acting FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday revealed that the Obama administration removed the names of over 500,000 individuals with active arrest warrants from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, according to The Daily Wire.

The deletion of the names was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who had originally pinned the change on the Trump administration.

“A little-noticed mandate from the Trump administration has cleared the way for some people with outstanding arrest warrants to purchase guns, a change that worries law enforcement officials who say it could be allowing dangerous criminals to arm themselves,” The Journal-Constitution reported last October.

“Six months after the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo redefining who is a fugitive from justice — and cannot have a gun — more than a half a million names have been dropped from a national law enforcement data base used to determine who may purchase a firearms and or obtain a carry permit, according to FBI records provided to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.”

The title of the article was equally unsubtle: “Trump Administration change allows some facing arrest to buy guns.” Needless to say, Senate Democrats were interesting in asking Deputy Director Bowdich why the Trump administration would make such a move.

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“It’s my understanding that under federal law fugitives cannot legally purchase or possess guns,” California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrats’ all-star gun-grabber in the upper chamber, queried Bowdich.

“We’ve heard from local law enforcement that the Justice Department has issued a memo that forced the FBI NICS background check database to drop more than 500,000 names of fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants because it was uncertain whether those fugitives had fled across state lines.”

“Mr. Bowdich, can you describe why this determination was made by the Justice Department?” she asked.

Sen. Feinstein thought she’d scored a “gotcha” moment. And lo and behold, she had. Just not quite in the way she had imagined.

“That was a decision that was made under the previous administration,” Bowdich replied.

“It was the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that reviewed the law and believed that it needed to be interpreted so that if someone was a fugitive in a state, there had to be indications that they had crossed state lines.”

Shock Revelation: Obama Admin Actively Sabotaged Gun Background Check System

Shock Revelation: Obama Admin Actively Sabotaged Gun Background Check System

 

Oh. Well, then.

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Now, let’s be clear here. The Obama administration is no longer in charge and this was a pretty awful decision. The legal and technical machinations of how — or whether — this purge can be reversed probably ought to be a priority over at the Department of Justice right now.

However, the Obama administration’s involvement here is a pretty big deal, particularly given the impact of the change. “Although the revision has only been in effect for six months, there has already been a noticeable dip in the number of gun sales denied because the potential buyer was a ‘fugitive from justice,'” the Journal-Constitution reported last October.

“According to NICS data, there was an 80 percent decline, compared to the same period in 2016.”

If what Mr. Bowdich is saying is correct, the Obama administration’s Justice Department made it exponentially easier for fugitives to purchase weapons, essentially sabotaging the same background check system they now put forward as the savior of our mass shooting woes.

Ironically, The Journal-Constitution — the very outlet that broke the story last October, when the purge was blamed on the Trump administration — completely failed to mention any of this in their piece on Bowdich’s Wednesday testimony. Instead, they focused on the fact that Bowdich “acknowledged to Congress that serious mistakes were made in not acting on tips about the gunman who killed 17 people at a Florida high school a month ago.”

That’s completely accurate. But the buried story here — the fact that the Obama administration apparently made it significantly easier for fugitives to obtain firearms — remained totally unmentioned. Quelle surprise.

What are your thoughts on our current background check system? 

Take Away Rights Without Due Process--First Knee Jerk Response To Orlando By Dems

Latest Dem Gun Grab Proves Left Has Come Unhinged

It took about 5 minutes after the Orlando terror attack for Democrats to come out of the woodwork screaming for more gun control.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has just put forward a piece of legislation that would deprive anyone who has been on a watch list “in the preceding five years” from being able to purchase a gun.

That’s right. Sen. Feinstein wants to create a watch list of people who used to be on watch lists. Then she wants to use it to deprive citizens of due process.

Breitbart reports:

The NRA voiced opposition to Feinstein’s legislation by pointing out that anyone that has kept up with the actual watch list through the years knows that the “vast majority” of those listed on it have never been charged with a crime. Therefore, taking away their Second Amendment rights ignores their due process protections.

And the Times points out that the list has contained high-profile aberrations throughout the years, with names of “Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative John Lewis” both showing up on the list for a time.

While Republicans like Paul Ryan have criticized the calls for stricter gun control a knee-jerk reaction to a tragedy, other like Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) have suggested that “due process is killing us” when it comes to securing more gun control.

What do you think of the possibility of a watch list of watch lists being used to deprive you of your Second Amendment?

Senator Feinstein, The One Trick Pony Of Gun Control

ProPublica fact checks Feinstein on the Assault Weapons ban

Posted on September 26, 2014 by ProPublica

This piece, written by Lois Beckett, was originally published by ProPublica.

In the ten years since the federal assault weapons ban expired, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has kept trying to renew the law, which she authored. In a press release this month honoring the 20th anniversary of the ban, she wrote, “The evidence is clear: the ban worked.”

But gun violence experts say the exact opposite. “There is no compelling evidence that it saved lives,” Duke University public policy experts Philip Cook and Kristin Goss wrote in their book “The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

A definitive study of the 1994 law – which prohibited the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic guns with “military-style features” such pistol grips or bayonet mounts as well as magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition – found no evidence that it had reduced overall gun crime or made shootings less lethal. “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” the Department of Justice-funded study concluded in 2004. “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

As we recently reported, key gun control groups say they are no longer making an assault weapons ban a priority because they think focusing on other policies, including universal background checks, are a more effective way to save lives. The Center for American Progress released a report earlier this month suggesting ways to regulate assault weapons without banning them.

Feinstein introduced an updated version of the assault weapons ban last year, in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in which the shooter used a type of rifle that had been targeted by the ban. She told her Senate colleagues to “show some guts” when they voted on it in April. The measure failed, 40 to 60. The push to improve background checks also failed, but attracted more support.

The key statistic that Feinstein cited in her recent press release — that the ban “was responsible for a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal”— was rejected by researchers a decade ago.

Feinstein attributed the statistic to an initial Department of Justice-funded study of the first few years of the ban, published in 1997.

But one of the authors of that study, Dr. Christopher Koper, a criminologist from George Mason University, told ProPublica that number was just a “tentative conclusion.”  Koper was also the principal investigator on the 2004 study that, as he put it, “kind of overruled, based on new evidence, what the preliminary report had been in 1997.”

Feinstein’s spokesman, Tom Mentzer, contested the idea that the 2004 study invalidated the 1997 statistic that Feinstein has continued to cite. But Koper said he and the other researchers in 2004 had not re-done the specific analysis that resulted in the 6.7 percent estimate because the calculation had been based on an assumption that turned out to be false. In the 1997 study, Koper said, he and the other researchers had assumed that the ban had successfully decreased the use of large-capacity magazines. What they later found was that despite the ban, the use of large-capacity magazines in crime had actually stayed steady or risen.

“The weight of evidence that was gathered and analyzed across the two reports suggested that initial drop in the gun murder rate must have been due to other factors besides the assault weapons ban,” Koper said.

Cook, the Duke public policy expert, told ProPublica that the “weak results” of the 1994 ban “should not be interpreted to mean that in general bans don’t work.”

He said Feinstein’s updated version of the ban, which she proposed in 2013 and is more restrictive, might be more effective. An American assault weapons ban might also have an impact on drug and gang-related violence in Mexico, he said.

“Around 30,000 Americans are killed with guns each year; one-third of those are murders,” Feinstein said in a statement to ProPublica. “Obviously there’s no single solution, which is why I support a wide range of policy proposals to bring sense to our firearms laws.  I continue to believe that drying up the supply of military-style assault weapons is an important piece of the puzzle—and the data back this up.” (See Feinstein’s full statement below.)

Gun rights groups have long criticized the ban, and Feinstein’s defense of it.

“Gun rights organizations, Second Amendment people, always take Dianne Feinstein with the whole shaker full of salt,” said Dave Workman, the communications director for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.  “She’s been a perennial gun-banner.”

“One would think the lesson learned from banning alcohol, marijuana, and many other drugs and items [is that] it never works for anyone intent on obtaining any of these items,” Jerry Henry, the executive director of GeorgiaCarry.org, told ProPublica. “All it does is put it in the background and helps establish a flourishing black market.”

The National Rifle Association did not respond to a request for comment.

Full Feinstein statement:

“Around 30,000 Americans are killed with guns each year; one-third of those are murders. Obviously there’s no single solution, which is why I support a wide range of policy proposals to bring sense to our firearms laws. We need to expand background checks, strengthen gun trafficking laws and make sure domestic abusers, the seriously mentally ill and other dangerous people cannot access guns.

“I continue to believe that drying up the supply of military-style assault weapons is an important piece of the puzzle—and the data back this up. These weapons were designed for the military and have one purpose: to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. They are the weapon of choice for grievance killers, gang members and juveniles, and they shouldn’t be on the streets.

“A 2004 Justice Department study found clear evidence that the ban on manufacture and transfer of assault weapons reduced their use in crimes. The percentage of assault weapons traced as part of criminal investigations dropped 70 percent between 1993 and 2002, and many police departments reported increases in the use of assault weapons after the ban expired. In less than a decade, the ban was already drying up supply. The study suggested the law would have been even more effective if it had banned weapons already in circulation and if it had continued past its 10-year duration. Unfortunately those limits were part of the compromise that had to be struck to pass the ban into law.

“Let me be clear: Assault weapons allow criminals to fire more shots, wound and kill more individuals and inflict greater damage. The research supports that. A ban on assault weapons was never meant to stop all gun crimes, it was meant to help stop the most deadly mass shootings. That’s why it needs to be a part of the discussion, or rampages like Sandy Hook will continue to happen.”

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to a round of ammunition as a “bullet.” Properly speaking, ammunition rounds include not just the bullet, but also propellant, primer, and case.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. 

Oh How The Screw Turns--Anti-Gunner Is Accused Of Selling Illegal Firearms. Hypocrite!

FBI Arrests Anti-Gun California Senator on Firearm Trafficking Charges

Posted on March 28, 2014

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Being good Americans, we take the position that anyone who is arrested and charged with multiple crimes is innocent until proven guilty. That's more than California state senator Leland Yee (D) has done for gun owners in the past. In August 2012, Yee said "no one will convince me it's anything other than a joke to say that having multiple clips and semi-automatic weapons that can shoot 100 or more bullets at a time is necessary in this state or in this country, it's ridiculous."

Now, Yee has other things with which to concern himself, and none is a joking matter.

The San Jose Mercury-News reports that "Yee now is accused of consorting with notorious felons, accepting money for his cash-strapped political campaigns in exchange for favors and promising undercover FBI agents he could deliver connections to international gun runners." Additionally, he "is depicted in a startling, 137-page FBI affidavit of repeatedly offering to broker illegal firearms sales in exchange for campaign contributions," and he is "linked to a host of wrongdoing to pad his political war chest, charged with seven felonies in a case with two dozen defendants accused of everything from money laundering to murder-for-hire."

The Sacramento Bee reports that also arrested along with Yee was one Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow, a former Chinatown organized crime figure who once served time in prison for gun trafficking, and who radical gun control supporter Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) later praised as a model of reform. The paper separately reports that "The FBI affidavit attached to the corruption case of state Sen. Leland Yee details a world of armaments: bulletproof vests, revolvers, assault rifles, shoulder-fired rockets and mines."

KRON-4, a San Francisco-area station, reports that Yee "asked for campaign donations in exchange for introducing an undercover FBI agent to an arms trafficker." Court documents posted with the KRON-4 article assert that "According to Senator Yee, the arms dealer had contacts in Russia, Ukraine, Boston and Southern California. . . . Senator Yee said, 'Do I think we can make some money? I think we can make some money. Do I think we can get the good? I think we can get the goods.' . . .  Senator Yee said 'Because, I'm getting a little more into this, it's not just Russia; the Muslim countries have sources too'. . . Senator Yee asked [another person involved] if he wanted 'automatic weapons' as opposed to semi-automatic weapons."

Like Chow, Yee, too, is popular with gun control supporters. In 2006, the Brady Campaign rated Yee an "A+" andnamed him to the group's so-called "Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll." In bestowing the "honor," the Brady Campaign noted that Yee had sponsored legislation to require semi-automatic handguns to have micro-stamping features and had supported a variety of other gun control proposals.

Now, gun control advocates join Yee in having other things with which to concern themselves. The Associated Pressreports "Gun-control groups (are) trying to find a new legislative leader to champion firearms restrictions after one of their most outspoken supporters was charged in a federal gun-trafficking case."

Until now, Yee had been campaigning to be elected as California's Secretary of State. He has since withdrawn from the race. SF Gate reports that Yee's lawyer sized up his client's situation by saying "The future will hold a lot of work."

No doubt it will.

The Bill Of Rights Has Become The Rights Obama Will Allow You To Have.

Obama’s Continuing Constitutional Assault

March 26, 2014 by Bob Livingston 

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Now even the state’s chief propaganda organ notes the Barack Obama regime is the greatest threat to press freedom in this generation. New York Times reporter James Risen, under attack to testify and disclose a source in the trial of a former CIA officer, made this claim in a conference of journalists, communication and government professionals on Friday.

Risen said, “The Administration wants to ‘narrow the field of national security reporting to create path for accepted reporting.’ Any journalist who exceeds those parameters ‘will be punished,’” according to a report by the Poynter Institute on Poynter.org.

Global press organizations have noticed, too. We reported last month that the U.S. had fallen to 46^th place on Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index for 2014. And that was before we learned the FCC intended to place “monitors” in newsrooms across the country.

Reporters themselves are as much to blame as the Obama regime. They have accepted the regime’s ground rules for cooperation and have even submitted their articles for approval by the regime.

But it’s not just the 1^st Amendment the Obama regime is assaulting. The entire Constitution is dying a death by thousands of paper cuts.

In addition to its targeting of national security reporting, the regime is targeting whistleblowers at an unprecedented rate. That, and National Security Agency and CIA snooping of reporters’ emails and telephone calls has had a chilling effect on sources.

The regime has targeted alternative media with a band of cyber warriors tasked withdisrupting news sites and blogs “to make postings through proxy servers and effectively use alternate identities and multiple e-mail addresses. Their purpose is to spread disinformation, not truth.” By the way, we have identified a handful of these operatives at work on Personal Liberty Digest™.

The 2^nd Amendment is under constant assault from the regime and its proxies. Just last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein began another attempt at passing a ban on so-called “assault weapons.”

The 4^th Amendment died under George W. Bush, but Obama set the carcass on fire and then spit on it with his expansion of powers of the Department of Homeland Security and stepped-up spying by the NSA, CIA, FBI and others.

Obama’s assaults on the 5^th and 6^th Amendments through drone attacks and racist Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of (In)Justice selective prosecutions are relentless.

Obama has bypassed Congress and destroyed the separation of powers through his use of executive orders and regulations enacted through the alphabet soup regulatory agencies. The passage of Obamacare itself, called a tax by the Supreme Court, violated Article I, Section 7.

Yes, the Obama regime is the greatest threat to the 1^st Amendment — and the entire Constitution — in a generation, at least. But the undocumented usurper currently occupying the people’s house is probably even more dangerous to liberty than was Franklin Delano Roosevelt and maybe even as dangerous as was Abraham Lincoln. He’s certainly created a divide almost as wide as Lincoln created.

Congress Gets A Taste Of The CIA/NSA Monitoring For Which It Found Few Issues! Maybe Feinstein Will Not Be So Cavalier About Spying On Us.

Reid asks for computer examination in CIA dispute

Thursday, March 20th 2014, 12:19 pm

Donna Cassata - Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has instructed the Senate's chief law enforcement officer to examine the Intelligence Committee's computers amid an escalating fight between the CIA and lawmakers over access to secret documents about the agency's interrogation tactics during the Bush administration.

In a letter dated Wednesday to CIA Director John Brennan, Reid challenged the spy agency head's complaints that committee staff improperly accessed the agency's computers to obtain the documents, calling the allegation "patently absurd."

Last week, the head of the committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, questioned whether the agency broke the law and violated the Constitution in searching a computer network exclusively established for the committee.

Brennan has dismissed Feinstein's complaints.

Determined to resolve the fight, Reid said he had "instructed the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms (Terrance W. Gainer) to initiate a forensic examination of the computers and computer network assigned for exclusive (committee) use, in order to determine how the 'Panetta review' entered into the (committee) network."

The committee is close to completing a 6,000-page report on the CIA's brutal interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, at secret sites after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The CIA had established an exclusive computer network for committee staff in northern Virginia. In the course of the panel's investigation, the committee staff obtained documents from a review ordered by former CIA Director Leon Panetta and apparently took those documents to the Capitol.

"I understand that you have alleged that Senate Committee staff illicitly accessed classified CIA networks to obtain a document — the so-called 'Panetta Review' — which appears to corroborate the findings and conclusions of the committee's study and to contradict the CIA's own official response to the study," Reid wrote Brennan. "To my knowledge, the CIA has produced no evidence to support its claims that Senate committee staff who have no technical training somehow hacked into the CIA's highly secure classified networks, an allegation that appears on its face to be patently absurd."

Reid cited Brennan's Jan. 27 letter to Feinstein in which he said he would welcome an independent review. Reid asked Brennan to ensure that CIA personnel refrain from further interaction with committee staff on the issue, with the exception of the sergeant-at-arms staff. Reid also requested the appropriate security clearances for Gainer.

Gainer oversees Capitol security, heading a force of about 1,000.

Reid commented briefly on the dispute last week. The instructions to Gainer and the notification to Brennan ratcheted up a clash that pits Senate Democrats, led by Feinstein, against President Barack Obama's head of the spy agency.

In a war of words between the agency and the Senate, the acting general counsel of the CIA has referred the matter to the Justice Department. The CIA's independent inspector general also has referred the issue to Justice.

Holder said Wednesday the department is reviewing the referrals.

Reid sent a separate letter to Attorney General Eric Holder in which he challenged the credibility of Brennan's claims. He also echoed Feinstein in raising conflict-of-interest concerns about the CIA's acting general counsel filing a criminal referral with Justice. The general counsel was mentioned by name 1,600 times in the committee's study of the interrogation program.

Troubled by the CIA's actions, Reid wrote to Holder, "Left unchallenged, they call into question Congress' ability to carry out its core constitutional duties and risk the possibility of an unaccountable intelligence community run amok."

Feinstein's dispute was sparked by fighting between Senate investigators and the CIA over a committee report on harsh interrogations. The report, which is still classified, concludes the CIA's use of coercive questioning was torture and produced little useful intelligence. The CIA argues the methods yielded important intelligence leads.

Senate aides reviewing classified computer files overseen by the agency have accused the CIA of monitoring their searches and withdrawing hundreds of internal documents without explanation. CIA officials blamed the aides for improperly accessing and mishandling classified files.

Both sides have claimed laws were broken. Brennan warned Feinstein in the January letter of a security breach caused by the aides; Feinstein accused the CIA last week of "a potential effort to intimidate this staff."

The committee is planning to vote next week on declassifying a 400-page summary of its report on harsh interrogations used during the war on terror, according to a government official. If approved, a CIA unit dedicated to line-by-line declassification will review the document, a process that also will involve lawyers from the CIA general counsel's office.

The committee is pressing for White House involvement and oversight of the process to ensure that any CIA official who was part of the interrogation unit doesn't have a say in what is declassified.

The official was not authorized to discuss the private talks and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Since Feinstein's remarkable broadside against the agency last week, the committee and the spy agency have continued contacts, focusing mostly on the declassification process.

Separately, Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., a member of the committee, sent a letter to Obama on Thursday pressing for declassification of the committee's study of the CIA detention and interrogation program as soon as possible in an effort to "move past this dark chapter in our history."

The Associated Press obtained a copy of Reid's letter to Brennan.